Authors: Lesley Thomas
But the Arab gunfire had moved us on. We speeded now towards the west, to where the Jerusalem heights fell away to the Corridor through which Selma had driven me a few days earlier. I found myself searching for her house, marking it from the windmill which I had immediately picked up. But before I had sorted the house from all the others in the roads and alleys we were moving determinedly away from the city and towards the road to Tel Aviv.
The helicopter hung, then dropped like a large insect through some pines and into a clearing. It flapped away grumpily, bending the light trees with the force of its wind, until the pilot switched off the rotors. First the young officer climbed down and then helped Shoshana and myself to the ground. The others followed.
Under the trees, spread out like some concealed circus, was a formation of military vehicles, camouflaged tents, and caravans. Radio aerials stood up straighter and higher than the fine trunks of the conifers. There were sentries below the trees and other men moving about, bent and mysterious, through the woods.
The young officer from the helicopter said to us, as though addressing a group of tourists, which I suppose we were: 'We are near the command post of General Narkis, the Commander of the Central Front. I will tell someone I have brought you. Please stay here by our chopper because if you walk someone may shoot you. They are wanting to shoot people very badly today.'
'Preferably Arabs, but they're not particular,' I suggested as he moved off. The pilot was fussing around wiping the nose of his helicopter with a piece of rag as considerately as a patient mother tending a snotty child. We stood in a close group by the aircraft. I felt awkward, in the way a prisoner must feel awkward, standing about waiting for something to happen.
Shoshana was smiling and looking about her. Zoo Baby was wriggling in his sweated uniform. His eyes were closed up like a hippo's eyes. Dov considered the sky through the trees as though a military establishment was not to be spied upon and it would be cheating or presumptive to look. O'Sullivan and Metzer stood together with the two other musicians and the injured Mendel who was sitting unhappily
on the ground.
From the dark tents our officer reappeared with a tall, thin, yet oddly military looking figure. There was no wind, hardly a breeze among these trees, but his wide Army shorts flapped like flags about his knees, as the man walked briskly to us.
'This is Captain Harris,' said our officer. 'He will speak with you.'
'I think perhaps under
1
the trees,' suggested the new man in English with a fine Sandhurst accent. 'Bloody warm out here for a start and we don't want any damned aeroplanes prying on us do we ? Come along.'
We went below the trees, Harris ushering us along fussily. We stood there, again like an awkward group of prisoners. O'Sullivan saluted and introduced himself first, bringing a mild raising of the officer's white eyebrows with his Irish accent, and then everyone else.
Harris looked around benignly. He had a ragged white moustache and a tight face. His military cap was pushed back of his fair hair and he kept scratching the exposed area. 'Christ knows what we're going to do with you people,' he said easily. 'We're likely to have a bash at Jerusalem in an hour or two, we're getting the tanks and things up from Ramla now, so we're all pretty busy here.'
Shoshana said: 'I want to go to Jerusalem. To the war.' She flapped her hands around inside her handbag like a woman looking for a bus ticket and brought out a pass in a perspex shield and some other documents. 'Correspondent,' she pointed to the pass firmly. 'I can go with the Army.'
He looked at her doubtfully. 'There are some newspaper people assembled down near the Mandelbaum Gate,' he said. 'Waiting for the balloon to go up, perhaps you could get some transport down there. Can't say I remember seeing any ladies there.'
I almost laughed when he said 'waiting for the balloon to go up'. He was so dated, so angular in every way that he could have been in one of the old films about our war. He checked that Mendel was not suffering from his wound. Then he considered Dov and Zoo Baby and a pleased expression broke on his thin face. 'You two fellows can go as escort for the young lady,' he said as though he had conceived a master tactic. 'That takes care of
you.
And you, sir, Mr Hollings, what are your plans ?'
'For the duration ?' I asked.
'For the duration,' he affirmed, acknowledging the cliche of the Forties.
'Well, I'd rather like to get back to London,' I said offhandedly.
'I expect you damn-well would, too. Well Lod is shut down for business, old man, as you might expect. I imagine BOAC have shifted their route through Beirut, but I can't get you there unless we advance a bit bloody quicker than I think we will. I think the best thing would be to get you to Tel Aviv. There's been a bit of odd shelling up there this morning, the Jordanian big guns from Kalkilya; and some silly bastard dropped a bomb on Natanya, obviously thinking it was Tel Aviv. But it was his last mistake.' He looked around at us. 'Right then,' he said, as though coming to a sudden decision. 'We'll try and rustle up some transport for you. It won't be much - but there's a war on you know!' He glanced at me again because of the expression. I nodded a smile.
'Mr Hollings, you will go along with the lady, er ... Miss Levy ... and with Mr Metzer and with these three gentlemen as escorts.' He indicated Dov, Zoo Baby and O'Sullivan. 'You can drop all five at the Mandelbaum Gate and then the driver will take you on to Tel Aviv. It will only be a jeep, but it is the very best we can do on a Monday.'
Metzer said: 'Because I am in the company of Mr Hollings, I have arranged his tour here, I should go to Tel Aviv with him.' He was looking very fat and worried that afternoon. He was very anxious to get out of Jerusalem.
Harris said: 'Good idea, too. You'll have to squeeze up in the jeep, but four will be getting out so it should be more comfortable for the rest of the way.'
The other two musicians were to remain at the command post with Mendel who was to have his leg wound treated. Harris gave a little chicken nod to each of us to check we understood, then turned his heel in the dust and strutted thinly away.
He called back over his shoulder: 'It might be half an hour before I can arrange anything. I'll get someone to fix you with food. You don't know when you'll be eating again, that's the bloody trouble with war.'
'He is British?' asked Shoshana doubtfully. 'He says strange words. What means "rustle up" ?'
'It means he's going to obtain a jeep,' I said. 'He's British all right. Home Guard, I'd say, Sevenoaks, nineteen forty.'
'You can tell that sort an ocean away,' muttered O'Sul
livan
quietly. 'So we'll be saying goodbye to you, Mr Hollings. Off across the sea, are you.'
'As soon as I get something to cross it in,' I joked. At that moment I found myself looking first into the solemn face and then the full eyes of Shoshana. She was like she had been before the war. Her face had all the softness of the previous night and I remembered and felt her again, moving in love under the sheets of my bed in Eilat.
I suppose it was then at that moment that I let myself slip into love with her. When afterwards everyone thought I had gone off my head, my agent and my manager and all those others in England and in Europe, this was the time, I told them honestly, when it started. Her hand, now a gentle, small hand, moved out shyly to me, away from the others so they would not see. I moved mine two inches to meet her and they docked for a moment.
'Shalom,
Christopher,' she whispered.
'Shalom, shalom.'
But it was not until an hour later, when the tanks from Ramla were lining up for the first Israeli push into Jordan, that I made the mad move. Now, today, I still cannot account for it. Nothing in my life until then had ever motivated me except that it was for my own good and benefit. No person, certainly no woman, had ever turned me from the path I had decided to make and take. No person had ever taken any real love from me or given it to me. But when we reached the road junction, the turning one way to the Mandelbaum Gate and the other the road back to rejoin the Tel Aviv highway; at that point, I decided to go with her. She and Dov and Zoo Baby and O'Sullivan had climbed from the jeep. They had shaken hands with me and with Metzer. We all laughed and Shoshana had pressed a wet face and then her wet lips to me, and I was left sitting in the jeep with Metzer and the driver. The four moved off like a little patrol towards a group of tanks hiding beneath some tamarisk trees, turning and waving cheerfully to me. Then I called to them and got from the jeep and ran across the sunUt road after them. I heard Metzer, in English, and the driver, in Hebrew, caU out behind me and the four in the front shouted and told me to go back. But I didn't.
I ran down the sloping road to them like a schoolboy running towards his friends. God knows what I was thinking about. But I had done it and that was sufficient. I didn't care a bugger about the war or who was fighting or why. But I wanted to be with her. I could not leave her in Jerusalem.
'Forget something?' asked O'Sullivan wryly.
'Nothing. I merely thought it would be better to come along with you. I can't get out of the flaming country tonight anyway and I might as well be here than in Tel Aviv.'
Shoshana was staring at me. 'Christopher,' she said throatily. 'You must go. There will be fighting here in one hour.'
'They're shelling Tel Aviv,' I shrugged with new bravado. 'You heard Harris say so. Big guns from Kalkilya or somewhere. And they might move across the border any moment and cut the road or bombard it. I'll stay. I have a personal escort.' I nodded at the three odd soldiers, O'Sullivan, Dov and Zoo Baby. Then I said: 'Besides, I like Jerusalem.'
Metzer, his thick body turned around in the jeep as far as it would go, bawled something in Hebrew to Zoo Baby and then I heard him call angrily to Dov by name.
'He says you've got to go to Tel Aviv. You have not the insurance to get killed in a battle,' said Zoo Baby. 'Maybe I go tell him to fuck off. I have not liked this man very much.'
Dov interrupted, calling something to Metzer who was red with fury. The tank men, waiting for the big battle and peeping like calm mice from their armoured holes, watched the exchange with avid concern. Their heads went from our group to the jeep and back again, and then returned to us.
"We'll go,' decided Dov. 'Leave him to shout.' The five of us turned and ran down the road towards the Mandelbaum Gate. I half turned and saw Metzer apparently about to get out of the jeep. Then the artillery from the Jordan sector began shelling us. The explosions seemed to bounce up the road, blowing us sideways, leap-frogging among the tanks and the men. I felt Zoo Baby's huge protective arm over my head as we cowered in a ditch at the side of the road. It only lasted about a minute. When we looked up, with the air rolling with bitter smoke, two of the tanks were burning and there were soldiers lying dead a few yards away under the
tamarisk trees.
The jeep had overturned and Metzer was lying on his back in the road about ten yards from it. I could see that the driver was trapped under the jeep. As we started back towards Metzer the vehicle blew up with the explosion of its petrol tank. It began to burn heavily.
There was a lot of shouting going on. Hoses were being brought up to the burning tanks and the prostrate men were being quickly carried off. An officer in the leading tank was shouting orders and the column began to move off noisily like some crocodile rudely disturbed.
Metzer was stretched out as though he were enjoying a nap. O'Sullivan touched him and then half turned him on to his side and grimaced at the great hole in his back. Some stretcher bearers lumbered to us and O'Sullivan gave them a small nod. Civilians apparently got priority because there were still some soldiers lying around. They picked up the dead man and put him on their litter. We continued down the road. I did not feel so badly about Metzer as I had done about Scheerer or Solen the young man in the amphibian, although I had known him since the moment I left the plane at Lod. But this had been a long day and there had been a lot of dying so far. And it was only late afternoon.